In a conference call on Wednesday, John T. Chambers, Cisco’s chief executive, said he saw improvement in the United State market, especially toward the end of the quarter. But he cautioned that it was “way too early to call this a trend.” While orders were strong in Asia, especially in China, he said, they were falling in Europe and would most likely fall further.

Cisco was encouraged enough by its results to sharply increase its quarterly dividend payment 75 percent, to 14 cents a share, up from 8 cents.

The company’s routers and switches shuttle data around corporate data centers and across the Internet. So its results are a bellwether of the strength of investment in the engine rooms of the digital economy.

It reports its financial results in quarters that close a month later than the period used by most companies. The quarter reported on Wednesday, Cisco’s fiscal fourth quarter, tracked the company’s performance for May, June and July.

In closing its quarter a month later, Cisco, based in San Jose, sometimes gains an early glimpse of economic and industry trends. In May, for example, Cisco was one of the first companies to warn of the darkening outlook for business globally, as the financial crisis in Europe drags on and other markets weaken as well.

The company reported that its net profit rose to $1.9 billion, a 56 percent increase from the quarter a year earlier.

Photo

John T. Chambers, Cisco’s chief, at a conference in London.Credit
Neil Hall/Reuters

Cisco’s operating profit in the quarter increased 15 percent to $2.5 billion, or 47 cents a share. The results slightly exceeded the average estimate by analysts of 45 cents a share, as compiled by Thomson Reuters.

In after-hours trading, the company’s shares rose 85 cents, or nearly 5 percent, to $18.20 a share. In the regular trading session, the stock price added 18 cents to close at $17.35 a share.

Revenue for the quarter reached $11.7 billion, a 4 percent increase from the year-earlier quarter, when revenue totaled $11.2 billion. The revenue figure was just above the Wall Street average estimate of $11.6 billion.

Erik Suppiger, a JMP Securities analyst, said, “The quarter looked reasonably good, as Cisco is executing well on its plan.”

Part of that plan is cost-cutting. Last month, Cisco announced it would lay off 1,300 workers. But mostly, Cisco seems to be shifting its work force to tap markets abroad, where growth is faster than in developed nations and skilled workers are paid less. In the most recent quarter, Cisco said it increased its worldwide head count by 1,400, to more than 66,600 workers. More than half of the new hires, often engineers, were in emerging markets.

Cisco faces challenges from competing makers of networking equipment, like Hewlett-Packard and Huawei of China, which are seeking to gain market share by cutting prices. In the longer run, Cisco faces competition from the shift of more and more networking capabilities from hardware to software. Last month, VMware agreed to pay $1.26 billion for Nicira, a maker of so-called software-defined networking.

Yet Cisco has dominant positions in digital networking gear, like switches, where it holds 64 percent of the market, according to the research firm IDC. The shift to cloud computing, in which companies and consumers tap into computing resources and data from remote data centers, will reduce demand from some of Cisco’s corporate customers, analysts say.

But overall demand for Cisco’s technology, they say, should increase as many companies build their own cloud environments and the amount of data zipping across computer networks continues to surge because of the rising use of everything from smartphones to streaming video and music services.

“Cisco is a beneficiary of these trends,” said Rohit Mehra, an analyst at IDC.

A version of this article appears in print on August 16, 2012, on page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Cisco Revenue and Profit Exceed Forecasts as Orders in Asia Stay Strong. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe